Thanks for watching the videos. These videos were made to get down the format–it’s still being worked on. The plan is to post videos weekly. God Bless.
Tag: Catholicism
Farewell to the Devil?
In his essay “Farewell to the Devil?”, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) examines and rebuts the argument presented by Swiss Catholic Theologian Herbert Haag, who asserts that Satan does not exist and that Satan was an idea that manifested ancient Jewish culture’s understanding of evil and sin. (Ratzinger, Farewell to the Devil? 197.) Haag’s thesis was written during the time of great cultural upheaval both in secular culture and in Catholic Culture as his book “Farewell to the Devil” would be printed after the Vatican II council. It should be no surprise that Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr. Sosa, has recently made comments that Satan is an analogy making very similar points as presented in Haag’s argument ( A comment that Fr. Sosa has since walked back a bit).
Ratzinger explains that this position is one that uses a methodology that is devoid of literary analysis of scripture but rather is a methodology that focuses on a false historicism (emphasis mine) that those of a different era are either stupid, naive, or both, so in effect, Haag’s position is based on the rhetoric fallacy of “poisoning the well” of the witness testimony of Jesus and the Apostles as it is presented in the New Testament. Haag’s thesis is refuted by Ratzinger by examining the New Testament in which Satan and Demons exist, and the Devil is not a synonym for sin which is claimed by Haag (Ratzinger, Ibid.).
It’s so glaringly obvious in the belief of those in scripture that both Satan and Demons exist that Haag had to admit this is a commonly held belief of those in 1st century Palestine. However, Haag argues that these people were victims of their understanding and culture during this period of time. Again, it’s important to reiterate that Haag’s position is based on his own cultural bias in which he has already assumed those in Jesus’ time are inferior to his own understanding. Naturally, this type of assertion is one of the most dangerous facets of a strict historical-critic exegesis and the use of historicism by modern scholars. Ratzinger does a good job acknowledging that it’s Haag’s bias that has predetermined his conclusion on this matter, Ratzinger writes, “Haag bids the devil farewell, not in his capacity as exegete or interpreter of Scripture, but rather as a contemporary, who considered the existence of a devil untenable (Ratzinger, 198).”
One of the key aspects in understanding Satan and Demons, after examining the role of the Old Testament as being dependent on the New Testament, is understood when Ratzinger writes, “The spiritual battle against the enslaving powers, the exorcism pronounced over a world blinded by demons, is an inseparable part of Jesus’ spiritual way that belongs to the heart of his own mission and of the mission of his disciples.” (Ratzinger, 202). Furthermore, Ratzinger indicates that our understanding of the faith must be rendered within the faith community. If it is to be determined that Satan is merely an analogy to sin or a sort of moral taboo then the Church’s sacramental life with the foundation of baptism would be moot. Ratzinger writes, “One must be able to take baptism at its word, especially in its central action. It indicates what takes place in becoming a Christian and what does not…exorcism and the renunciation of Satan are part of the central action of baptism.” (Ratzinger, 203.)
At the end of the essay, Ratzinger questions what Haag means that the Devil cannot be understood to exist by what we know in our modern age. In many respects, I believe the question of “Farewell to the Devil?” is one that originates in the metaphysical and spiritual and moves into the material, perhaps, there is to be understood better the sacred and the profane. A good measurement of whether something is contingent on faith testimony which is the essence of the faith is its relation to the Incarnation itself.
How does Satan, the demonic, and hell relate to the Incarnation? In the course of the history of the Church, the great heresies have always been misguided teachings on who is Jesus Christ. Satan and hell must be articles of faith as without those parts of revelation, it would render the Incarnation useless. If theologians eliminate Adam and Eve, the fall, hell, and then the slope—as we see today—leads to there being no such thing as sin, then those theologians have rendered Jesus Christ merely an ancient understanding of the world.
Biblical Exegesis: Primarily a philosophical discussion or historical?
Pope Benedict XVI explained in his 1988 Erasmus lectures, “The debate about modern exegesis is not at its core a debate among historians, but among philosophers”. (Matthew J. Ramage, Jesus Interpreted, 9).
Is the discussion of the Holy Scriptures primarily a philosophical debate of those who claim there is a God and those who do not?
The statement appears to be correct on the surface; however, the difficulty with this particular assertion is that it is a false dichotomy when it comes to the interpretation of what is true and what actually happened as it is described in the written word. In attempting to determine what is true, the historian–both secular and religious–deals with the axiological value judgment of the truth just as much as any philosopher would when it comes to scriptural exegesis and the matter of what is the truth.
Make sure to pre-order my new book: The Birth of God in Historical Context: An Examination of the Infancy Narrative of Jesus Christ:
The Legion of Valor Men’s retreat: “Spiritual Warfare” w/ Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The Diocese of Springfield Illinois has created a new fraternal group to help support and grow the faith of men in its diocese. The diocese calls this group Legion of Valor and invites the men of our diocese to “close ranks. It’s time to pull up from the grind and gain some much-needed perspective. It’s time to take stock, to recharge, to refocus. It’s time to re-engage our mission as Catholic men.”
During the weekend of September 28th-29th, the topic of discussion for the Legion of Valor was “Entering into Spiritual Warfare.” The keynote speaker for the weekend was Fr. Sebastian Walshe, O. Praem. After the opening prayer for the weekend retreat, Mike Christe, Director of Evangelical and Catechetical Services, challenged us all to foster into our own prayer lives the prayer of the Church—the Liturgy of the Hours. Christe explained that through his own life he’s learned the value of prayer by experiencing the fog of battle in the spiritual battle. It was only when he revamped his prayer life that he was able to pierce through the fog with his prayer serving like night vision goggles. All Catholics needing to cultivate a foundation of prayer, Christe called us to participate in this vital battle by going to morning prayer.
After morning prayer, where the men learned how to pray the hours in community, the men were introduced to Fr. Sebastian Walshe, a Norbertine, from St. Michael’s Abbey in California. Fr. Walshe instructed the men that as Catholics we need to learn and be reminded that there are three distinct battles within the very real war of Spiritual Warfare.
1. The Flesh
2. The World
3. The Devil.
The conflict in this war is between two armies and the combatants are spiritual. Fr. Walshe explained that the spiritual can become visible in extraordinary manifestations such as oppression, possession, and obsession and voiced the concern of the growing trend within the Catholic Church expressing that Satan is merely a symbolism in the world. Fr. Walshe gave one particular example of the Superior General of the Jesuits claiming the sentiment and informed those at the retreat that the Superior General is either “a fool or something worse.”
One important aspect that spoke to me is that Fr. Walshe said that the most concerning aspect in the spiritual life is those who feel that they are okay. In their spiritual life, they do not feel any discomfort nor the pull of temptation. If we’re trying to live a life of holiness we should be aware of the stress of the able, the pull of temptation, and we should feel uncomfortable. Fr. Walshe went into a bit about fasting being a tool that allowed us not to be subject to the flesh and that abortion and the death of children is diabolical in nature because the demons do not want souls to replace them in heaven.
After the first talk ended the group broke for mid-morning prayer and mass. The mass was celebrated in the ordinary rite with the mass parts sung in Latin. It was offered by Fr. Dominic who served as the retreat’s Chaplin. The mass fostered a sense of reverence and was extremely moving hearing the packed chapel full of men chanting the Latin parts of the mass—an experience not easily forgotten.
The retreat broke for lunch after Mass.
The second talk given by Fr. Walshe was on the Virtue of Humility and the power of it. He reminded us that humility is the acceptance that God is in control of our lives, not ourselves. We should reject in our lives the spirit of discouragement and despair when trying to live a life of holiness—that the demonic are often behind these thoughts and we should openly renounce them. Fr. Walshe explained to the group that ultimately our goodness and holiness is given by God’s grace that whatever holiness we’re living it’s because we’re being held up by Christ and the Blessed Virgin like a child holding the hands of their father and mother.
Men must also reject false humility such as denying the goodness of God working through ourselves. For example, someone may give us praise and if we respond that we’re really nothing special we’re participating in false humility. Our response to praise should be “Thank you and thanks be to God, Fr. Walshe said. We also need to avoid the smallness of soul of thinking that we cannot be a great saint or that someone is better at something we’re called to by God. Rather what men should strive for is the virtue of magnanimity and desire to be worthy of the call. God wants us to do good things; he wants us to order our will to his own.
Fr. Walse explained to the men of the Springfield Diocese in Illinois a fantastic exegesis of the Parable of the Servants. He challenged us men to take risks for God. We cannot take the grace given to us by God and bury it out of fear of his wrath. What is striking about the parable is what the parable doesn’t ever say. Fr. Walse explained that any of the persons given talents we’d expect one of them to fail, but none of them do who take risks. We need to put our trust fully in God’s plan for us.
Fr. Walshe gave us ten steps to incorporate the virtue of humility in our spiritual lives:
1. Obedience
2. Confession—and hold nothing back in confession.
3. Make our defects public
4. Prefer the common good over our individual good
5. Accept unjust accusations—be confident and do not concern yourself with them
6. Be grateful for truthful correction
7. Do not be troubled by other’s faults; Jesus is the judge.
8. Think and speak well of others
9. Rejoice in our weaknesses and celebrate other’s strengths
10. Perform the mundane and meaningless tasks with joy.
The final short talk of the day was given to us on the weapons for Spiritual warfare which are offensive and defensive:
The Offensive weapons: prayer, fasting, the word of God, saying the name of Jesus and Mary, sacraments, and sacramentals.
The Defensive weapons: faith, hope, forgiveness, well-ordered family, and the sign of the cross.
The final activity of the day before dinner was given by an Our Saviour’s Parishioner and local knot-tying expert Scott Marshall on Mary–the undoer of knots–visit his knot tying youtube page here. Marshall explained the history of the devotion and its connection to Pope Francis while teaching the men how to tie practical knots for everyday activities with the history of knot tying. Some of the men professed a lesson in humility with the experience.
The evening ended with dinner, a business meeting for the diocese, evening prayer, adoration, and confession.
Sunday morning began with morning prayer, mass, and ended with Breakfast and our send out mission given by Our Saviour’s Parishioner Bob Zeller giving us the wisdom of the trials he’s experienced in his own spiritual life.
Learn more about the Legion of Valor at the diocese webpage.
The Ark of History: St. Augustine’s City of God
via wikipedia commons: “The Arka Church” in Nowa Huta, Poland.
St. Augustine’s City of God is such a vast body of work that to write several thousand words on the document would be futile. Instead of writing a quasi-commentary on the text, the hope here to highlight the theme of salvation historiography that Augustine attempts to flesh out from the fall of the Roman empire. The decline and fall of the Roman empire is also the subject and title of a famous work on the subject written by Edward Gibbon. It is a work still trumpeted in History and Classics departments at many universities. What is strange about the study of that particular work, which blames the Catholic Church for the fall of the Roman empire, is that many academics seem to miss the fact that Gibbon wrote it as a diatribe against Catholicism—a common theme in 18thcentury England.
Interestingly enough, the work is often used today as a source to criticize all of Christianity as a whole. The trouble about Gibbon’s particular text is that St. Augustine had utterly refuted it 1300 years prior. After learning the contexts of Augustine’s City of Godin comparison to Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I’d be utterly embarrassed to assign that particular text in a classroom.
Rodney Stark, professor of Religious Studies at Baylor University, writes in his book Bearing False Witness at length about Edward Gibbon’s misrepresentation for the fall of the Roman empire. Stark explains, “Edward Gibbon (1737-94) would surely have been in deep trouble had the bitterly antireligious views he expressed in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not been incorrectly seen as applying to Roman Catholicism … Gibbon’s readers assumed his attacks were specific to Catholicism and not aimed at religion in general.”[1]
A student may spend their entire academic career at multiple colleges studying Roman civilization and culture and never read Augustine, one of the great Latin writers, but will almost definitely read Gibbon. A sad testimony to many history departments on college campuses.
Augustine’s work, The City of God, was written from the year 413 to 426 A.D. Matthew Levering examines that The City of God can be broken into either two parts or five depending on the topics in the work.[2]Levering explains, “Divided into two parts, the work consists in ten books against the pagan gods, followed by twelve books on the origin, progress, and end of the City of God. Divided into five parts the work consists in five books against pagan worship as beneficial for this life; five books against pagan worship…as beneficial for the life to come; four books on the origin of the City of God; four books on its progress; and four books on its end.”[3]
In the frameworks of St. Augustine’s City of God, Augustine employs a particular method of recording history, an approach called by the author as an Augustinian historiography. Levering explains that Augustine seeks to illustrate what “we can expect from historical existence, Augustine painstakingly transforms it into a biblical understanding of history according to which our lives can only be rightly appreciated in terms of ecclesial participation in the eternal God through Christ and the Holy Spirit.”[4]A method commonly thought to have been concentrated in the 7thcentury by the Saint the Venerable Bede, but is Augustine’s use of it in a more expansive role is 300 years before Bede’s work on Ecclesiastical History of the English People.
In the opening paragraph, St. Augustine examines that the task he is about to undertake is one of great difficulty writing:
“I shall consider it both in its temporal stage here below (where it journeys as a pilgrim among sinners and lives by faith) and as solidly established in its eternal abode—that blessed goal for which we patiently hope ‘until justice be turned into judgment,’ but which, one day, is to be the reward of excellence in a final victory and a perfect peace. The task, I realize, is a high and hard one, but God will help me.”[5]
Whereas Edward Gibbon argued that Catholicism ushered what modern history is realizing to be a mythical dark age, Augustine examines the account, as an eyewitness, that Christianity gave moral restraint to Christian soldiers where pagan soldiers did not exercise such virtue:
Have not even those very Romans whom the barbarians spared for the sake of Christ assailed His Name? To this both the shrines of the martyrs and the basilicas of the Apostles bear witness: amid the city’s devastation, these buildings gave refuge not only to the faithful but even to infidels.[6]
St. Augustine examines that source for such barbarism was rooted in paganism. Levering explains, “The Romans constructed gods in their own worst image, and then they used those gods to justify their vicious behavior while at the same time openly mocking the behavior of the gods.”[7] A common objection from skeptics of the faith will be, “People don’t believe in the pagan gods anymore, why should I believe in your God.” It’s important to point out what St. Thomas Aquinas understood that a plethora of beings which all shared the same nature but possessed different characteristics or powers wouldn’t be a ‘god’ in the proper sense of the word. Therefore, one can know rationally there can be only one God. Augustine, in his rhetoric, plays against this idea of different attributed God’s when examining the worship of the Goddess of Victory. He observes that Victory in war must be related to some form of Injustice, and if Injustice is a moral good for the Roman empire when they expand it, perhaps, the Romans should worship Injustice.[8]
In our modern age, studies have shown that people who have sworn off the old religions are still inherently religious (or spiritual is what they claim).[9]The question then becomes, how do these people live out their quasi-spiritualism? Some folk feel as though there is a passive distant god, responsible for creation. The idea is similar to deism popular in the 17thand 18thcenturies with adherents like Thomas Jefferson. Others tend to focus on New Ageism, which is similar to pagan pantheism. Moreover, although there may be other variables, people recreate old religion or figures into their image that adherents for generations would fail to recognize.
Catholic Apologist Trent Horn writes, in his new book Counterfeit Christs, noticing his talk did not go over well with a group of Catholic school teachers:
Afterward, I asked one of the teachers, “What did you think of my presentation?”
“No offense,” she said, “but people like you get worked up about minor things like who can and can’t receive Communion, whereas I think we should just focus on being people of faith…
“I just don’t think Jesus would say that,” she continued. “He wouldn’t say , ‘No, you have this because of somebody’s rules.’ Jesus would be compassionate, not judgmental.”
I noticed on her name tag that she taught Theology, but I wasn’t surprised.[10]
What Trent is noticing is that people in our society, concerned with not rocking the boat, have made Jesus in the image of a smiling savior and have eliminated the judge. Some would argue that this is a result of a post-conciliar Church concerned with its public relations image in the face of the modern world. The theology and much of the liturgy after Vatican II seemed to move away from the High Christology of the Church (Savior and King) to only the Low Christology (Good Shepherd). The trouble with this perception is that it is an incomplete picture of who is Jesus. A perfect image of Jesus Christ is from an Icon at St. Catherine monastery at Mount Sinai. In that particular icon, the face of Christ is not symmetrical, on one side, it carries the compassionate Jesus, but on the other side is the face of judgment. There’s one aspect of mercy that people tend to forget is that for mercy to be needed, there must be something to be healed from which is sin—and to talk about sin is offensive to our society and many in the Church.
Pagan Gods or Demons?
Interestingly, Augustine makes a connection that because the pagan gods of Rome lead to lack of justice and virtue that they must be demons. Many contemporary Christians would scoff at such an idea of evil and the supernatural with modern psychology. However, not all examples within the Scripture, especially the Gospels, can be explained away as mental illness. For example, the particular witness of Jesus’ healing of the Gerasene demoniac and the death of the herd of pigs is something that modern psychology would lack with any answers.
8 For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9 And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” 10 And he begged him eagerly not to send them out of the country. 11 Now a great herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; 12 and they begged him, “Send us to the swine, let us enter them.” 13 So he gave them leave. And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea. [11]
Augustine understood that there is a spiritual war going on for your soul. It would be in all of our best interest to remember it.
Augustine Distinguishes between fate, predestination, and free will.
What is interesting is that Levering in the book, The Theology of Augustine, explains the position of Cicero as understanding that if God had foreknowledge (middle knowledge) that it would destroy any sense of human freedom.[12]Ironically, Cicero’s position is more or less the same understanding of reformed Calvinist theology of Divine Sovereignty and with it Double Predestination. If the Reformation was put into motion by the idea, “What did Augustine really mean?” then naturally it follows since Augustine contradicts by understanding that the creator can operate within our natures without circumventing our wills ontologically. Levering explains, “Augustine argues that we do not need to choose between divine foreknowledge and human freedom…The transcendent God creates the order of finite causes, in which he includes the creation of free, rational agents.”[13]
In college, I had a professor who was devoutly Russian Orthodox and had a very skewed view of Augustine’s understanding of Free Will due to the debates of the Reformation. Naturally, the Reformation, which so dominated the culture of Western society is more or less driven by hearsay in other Christian circles. What Augustine understands is that God being the creator in the order of beings is that creatures can still participate in the will of God with their free will intact as the nature of God is existence. The professor didn’t understand the nuance of Augustine’s understanding that St. Thomas Aquinas would further develop when it came to the will. Augustine’s thoughts on Free Will are sometimes isolated and taken out of context from On the Predestination of the Saints; however, whether it is from the Confessions, City of God, or his Retractions he makes very clear that man does have a capacity to decide his own outcome in salvation history. Augustine writes:
We would certainly not make a choice if we did not choose to make it. On the other hand, if we take necessity to mean that in virtue of which something must be so and so or must happen in such and such a way, I do not see that we should be afraid of such necessity taking away our freedom of will. We do not put the life of God and the foreknowledge of God under any necessity when we say that God must live an eternal life and must know all things. Neither do we lessen His power when we say He cannot die or be deceived. This is the kind of inability which, if removed, would make God less powerful than He is. God is rightly called omnipotent, even though He is unable to die and be deceived. We call Him omnipotent because He does whatever He wills to do and suffers nothing that He does not will to suffer. He would not, of course, be omnipotent, if He had to suffer anything against His will. It is precisely because He is omnipotent that for Him some things are impossible.
So with us, when we say we must choose freely when we choose at all, what we say is true; yet, we do not subject free choice to any necessity which destroys our liberty. Our choices, therefore, are our own, and they effect, whenever we choose to act, something that would not happen if we had not chosen. Even when a person suffers against his will from the will of others, there is a voluntary act—not, indeed, of the person who suffers. However, a human will prevails—although the power which permits this is God’s[14]
At the end of book 10, Augustine begins to formulate his theology on the City of God. Part of the foundation of his understanding of the City of God is formulated from his synthesis of Porphyry. What Augustine recognizes is that Neo-Platonists could only move so far in their understanding of the metaphysical (spiritual) world, “The Neo-Platonist attempted to combine the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, believed in a dualism of soul and matter, and God is ultimate transcendence… Although he preferred Neo-Platonist thought, Augustine corrected them, and these corrections found a home with Catholic philosophy” as Augustine synthesizes them within the understanding of the grace of God’s revelation in history.[15]Levering explains, “Scripture records a history in which God acts to reveal himself and to establish a community of holy worship—the City of God.”[16]
Understanding History through Christian lenses.
Augustine begins his treatment of his theology on the City God with a guide, much like On Christian Doctrine, on how to understand Scripture. Levering writes, “For Augustine, Scripture, while written by humans, “is manifestly due to the guiding power of God’s supreme providence, and exercises sovereign authority over the literature of all mankind.”[17]Naturally, this is the understanding and teaching of the Catholic Church:
CCC 105God is the author of Sacred Scripture. “The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.”
“For Holy Mother Church, relying on the faith of the apostolic age, accepts as sacred and canonical the books of the Old and the New Testaments, whole and entire, with all their parts, on the grounds that, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”
106God inspired the human authors of the sacred books. “To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.
107The inspired books teach the truth. “Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.”[18]
Augustine has this understanding of what is the purpose and intent for Scripture. He explains in reference to Genesis that there are only four people mentioned, but that doesn’t mean that there are only four people in the entire world. Levering explains, “Augustine reasons that the sacred author mentions only those humans who directly pertain to the narrative’s goal of tracing the heavenly city from Adam to Abraham to the people of God.”[19]Naturally, this is why the narrative mentions Cain going to Nod and knowing his wife.
Levering reminds us that “the path to the City of God is the humility that comes from the mediator who is the Word incarnate…without renewal and elevation by grace, humans cannot know how God intends for us to be united to him.”[20]
There’s another city than the City of God?
Augustine explains that the city of man has its beginning in the fall of some of the angels. Naturally, because God is timeless and eternal as Augustine explains in Book 11 of the City God as well as in the Confession. God was aware that humanity would divide into the two separate camps created by the angels.[21]Levering instructs his readers that “In short, Augustine’s analysis of creation and falls shows that the earthly city, which was created ‘by love of self, even to the contempt of God.’ Turns away from participation in God and seeks happiness strictly in the linear or horizontal dimension of history.”
It appears that Levering, or Augustine, may have contradicted himself when he asserts that Cain and Abel inaugurated the two cities, as he already stated such with the fall of some of the angels. However, perhaps, Levering is discussing how humanity begins to participate in the two cities is launched by Cain and Abel. Augustine writes:
Now, the first man born of the two parents of the human race was Cain. He belonged to the city of man. The next born was Abel, and he was of the City of God. Notice here a parallel between the individual man and the whole race. We all experience as individuals what the Apostle says: ‘It is not the spiritual that comes first, but the physical, and then the spiritual.’ The fact is that every individual springs from a condemned stock and, because of Adam, must be first cankered and carnal,2only later to become sound and spiritual by the process of rebirth in Christ. So, too, with the human race as a whole, as soon as human birth and death began the historical course of the two cities, the first to be born was a citizen of this world and only later came the one who was an alien in the city of men but at home in the City of God, a man predestined by grace and elected by grace. By grace an alien on earth, by grace he was a citizen of heaven.[22]
So, if the two cities were made possible by the fall of the Angels and founded by the act of Cain against his brother, what is the role of the City of God that appears surrounded by the city of man?
One of the significant motifs of the City of God is Noah’s Ark. Of course, many of our great Eastern churches, as well as Western, were designed to imitate the hull of a great ark with the Churches’ naves. Augustine explains that all interpreters of the flood narrative must convey “the mind of the writer who described the flood must realize the connections of this story with the City of God which, in this wicked world, is ever tossed like the ark in the waters of a deluge. [23]
This ark a symbolism of the City of God—the Body of Christ—“Undoubtedly, the ark is a symbol of the City of God on its pilgrimage in history, a figure of the Church which was saved by the wood on which there hung the ‘Mediator between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus.”[24]
So, how does the mediator, Christ Jesus, mediate on our behalf within the ark on our pilgrimage toward the City of God? Jesus refreshes us on our journey with the sacrament of his Sacred Body and Blood. Augustine stressed two particular themes of Catholic theology. Whereas many Protestant theologies focus on a personal relationship with the savior, Catholic theology stresses a communal relationship of the Body of Christ—the faithful—with Christ as the head:
Augustine stresses this point here:
#1 “There is, then, a true sacrifice in every work which unites us in a holy communion with God, that is, in every work that is aimed at that final Good in which alone we can be truly blessed. That is why even mercy shown to our fellow men is not a sacrifice unless it is done for God. A sacrifice, even though it is done or offered by man, is something divine—which is what the ancient Latins meant by the word sacrificium.[25]
The second point illustrates how the mediator Christ Jesus—the High Priest—offers the sacrifices of our bodies, the faithful, within the whole of his own mystical body to the Father.
#2 “true sacrifices are works of mercy done to ourselves or our neighbor and directed to God, and since works of mercy are performed that we may be freed from misery and, thereby, be happy, and since happiness is only to be found in that Good of which it is said: ‘But it is good for me to adhere to my God,’ it follows that the whole of that redeemed city, that is, the congregation or communion of saints, is offered as a universal sacrifice to God through the High Priest who, ‘taking the form of a servant, offered Himself in His passion for us that we might be the body of so glorious a Head. For it was this ‘form of a servant’ which He offered, it was in this form that He was the victim, since it is in ‘the form of a servant’ that He is Mediator, Priest and Sacrifice.[26]
What Augustine understands here is the foundational theology of early Christianity that works of mercy having an inherently sacramental nature as stated in the Gospel of Matthew chapter 25; the Judgment of All Nations:
31 “When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left. 34 Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ 46And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”[27]
We can see by this particular text that what we do for the least among us, while the ark is being battered by the waves of the city of man, is an act of worship and faith toward our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In this aspect, Christianity cannot be a personal faith, whether that faith is personal in prayer or when those in the secular society, the city of man, call the faithful to have the freedom of worship instead of the freedom to express their religion openly.
If there is no God; there is only politics.
There are a great many different schools of thought when it comes to writing history — a discipline known as historiography. There is the view of “big man” history where people are inspired by leaders and thus moves history. Another viewpoint is that our cultural attachments motivate us, whether they’re ethnic, religious, or forms of beauty. However, the most predominated view of history is that we’re shaped strictly by political factors. The political viewpoint of history has four predominate schools: marxist, New Left, Modernist, and Post-Modernist. Those particular schools breakdown into roughly two categories: class conflict vs. nation-state. How is this important to Augustine and the City of God? Augustine’s text is inherently a historical treatise on the fall of the Roman empire being the result of a transcendent history of the City of God.
Augustine writes:
Nevertheless, the individual in this community is driven by his passions to pursue his private purposes. Unfortunately, the objects of these purposes are such that no one person (let alone, the world community) can ever be wholly satisfied.[28]
Levering understands this as “History on this view, is largely the record of empire and oppression, as it is in the modern study of history.”[29]The irony is that if the world is only material and secular; what is considered to be moral is only built on borrowed capital from Christian ethics. It’s undoubtedly true that atheist can be moral people, but they do not do so from an atheistic viewpoint. If we are all material accidents, then what happens between us is a mere accident. The only moral law becomes Nietzsche’s ‘state of nature,’ where the strongest are free to oppress the weak.
The idea that the political sphere is the key factor in moving history was challenged on June 2, 1979. A son of Poland returned home to Warsaw, as Pope John Paul II, he “walked vigorously down the stairway from the…[airplane]…, and kissed the ground of Poland. Church bells began tolling throughout a country electric with anticipation.”[30]A nation, starved for faith by materialist oppression of the Soviet Union, started to drown out their native son with chants, “We want God…We Want God…”
Of course, this gets into Augustine’s view on how the Church, ark, is to operate being battered by the waves of the city of man. It’s essential to note Augustine’s exegesis here because Jesus taught the kingdom of God is at hand, and this something that even a consensus of secular scholars acknowledge as a teaching from a historical Jesus who professed this message in 1stcentury Judea. So, how are we to view the ark and its pilgrimage? Augustine says:
“We conclude, therefore, that even now, in time, the Church reigns with Christ both in her living and departed members. ‘For to this end Christ died,’ says St. Paul, ‘and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.’ If St. John mentions only the souls of the martyrs, that is because they who have battled for the truth unto death reign in death with a special splendor. But, as the part is here used for the whole, we know that the words apply to the remaining faithful who belong to the same Church which is Christ’s Kingdom”[31]
Naturally, this plays into the idea that the Kingdom of God in the Gospels was coming, has come, and will come with the second coming of Christ. Professor of History and Classics Peter Burnell writes in his book The Augustinian Personhow the those who are living in the ark of the City of God should civilly participate in the city of man: “The perfectly just civil society, he says, is so by being a perfect sacrifice to God.”[32]So, it’s certainly not overstated that the duty of the faithful within the Body of Christ is to live a life of sacrifice.
[1]Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History(West Conshohocken: Templeton Press. 2016), 3.
[2]Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 113.
[5]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books I–VII, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Demetrius B. Zema and Gerald G. Walsh, vol. 8, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1950), 17–18.
[6]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books I–VII, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Demetrius B. Zema and Gerald G. Walsh, vol. 8, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1950), 19.
[9]Michael Lipka, and Claire Gecewicz. “More Americans Now Say They’re Spiritual but Not Religious.” Pew Research Center. September 06, 2017. Accessed June 18, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/06/more-americans-now-say-theyre-spiritual-but-not-religious/.
[10]Trent Horn, Counterfeit Christs(El Caljon: Catholic Answers, 2018), 15-16.
[14]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books I–VII, 263.
[15]Phillip Hadden, Discussion Thread #1. 2019, Unpublished manuscript, Holy Apostles College and Seminary.
[18]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 31.
[22]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books VIII–XVI, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Grace Monahan, vol. 14, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1952), 414.
[23]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books VIII–XVI, 478–479.
[24]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books VIII–XVI, 477–478.
[25]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books VIII–XVI, 125.
[28]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, 84.
[30]George Wiegel, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II(New York: Harper, 2001), 305.
[31]Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Books XVII–XXII, ed. Hermigild Dressler, trans. Gerald G. Walsh and Daniel J. Honan, vol. 24, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1954), 278.
[32]Peter Burnell, The Augustinian Person (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2005), 142.
Let Your Heart Burn for the Lord. St. Augustine–The Confessions
What can be written about St. Augustine’s Confessions that has not already been written? The Confessions is the first great autobiography of Western Civilization from one of the great pillars of Western thought and rhetoric. Furthermore, it is an examination of the conscience of a man, who with contrition in his heart, tells his conversion story. If one were to read only the first page, one could still understand the thesis of the entirety of the work itself. Augustine writes, “Thou awakest us to delight in Thy praise; for Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”[1]What is intriguing about Augustine’s particular thought here is that if any student or scholar does take the time to research Augustine, this quote will be undoubtedly quoted in many articles on the man. Matthew Levering in his book The Theology of Augustine explains the phenomena with this particular passage writing that “Many of the key elements of the Confessions are here: As creatures, we yearn to share in God’s life. God has created us for this end, and by grace God moves us toward it. We are restless until we attain rest in God.”[2]
How are we to relate to Augustine’s examination of conscience? Western society in the 21stcentury is a society that values liberty and freedom as the supreme good. It is a society that is concerned with mostly autonomous rights, and choice. However, it does not necessarily follow that joy and freedom are fruits of unsolicited choice. Western society is like that of a restaurant which on the menu has every conceivable choice to be made for dinner. However, there becomes a great difficulty and less freedom to enjoy their dinner when has the stresses of a glut of decisions. Can you really enjoy your dinner better at this location compared to the restaurant down the street that has a menu streamlined with a few items which you are still free to decide what to have for dinner?
Several studies indicate that after the modernization of Western society after the 1960s people are either not any happier or less happy. In an article in the National Catholic Register commentator Mary Eberstadt writes, “With all the gains they have made with increased freedom and financial independence and less discrimination, women are less happy now than 40 years ago. Sociologists can call it a ‘paradox,’ but it is only a paradox if the sexual revolution makes you happy. What if it doesn’t? That’s the radical thought people should be ready to entertain.”[3]Sexual libertinism is something that Augustine would be quite knowledgeable in attempting to satisfy is own quest toward happiness.
It is in The Confessions; Augustine is a man who takes what he wants from the world. In these pages, that same man also does what he wants with the pleasures of the body. He begets a child out of wedlock with a mistress whom the Confessions never names. Augustine leaves behind the ‘shackles’ of his family, including his pious mother, to seek riches and glory in the Roman court of Caesar in Milan as the Emperor’s orator. Moreover, this man, whom our modern world would suggest as one of the most successful of men, a man who seeks fame, riches, glory, passions does not find himself to be happy. Why? It is because our souls, which make up a part of our nature with our finite bodies, are eternal in the sense of being created by God and the finite world cannot satisfy was is meant to be eternally with God.
The Confessions, although an autobiography, reads more of a personal prayer of man to his God. The text is Psalm like in quality, and naturally, this autobiography becomes somewhat of a manual on how to find God through prayer as “Augustine answers that we can seek him in prayer, and he will answer our prayer.”[4]Fr. Allan Fitzgerald highlights this understanding of the particular text by writing, “Recognizing that the Confessions lifted his mind and heart toward God was a way of saying that he was not recounting events or writing an autobiography or narrating history. This is a book about a relationship, about his learning to pray to God.”[5]
Levering asks an interesting question in the context of Augustine’s epiphany, “Why does everlasting happiness or misery depend on loving a God whom we have such trouble finding?”[6]Levering gets to a particular difficulty that many skeptics and nonbelievers arrive at when they go down the rabbit hole of atheism, “Why does anything exist? Or More alarming, why do I even exist? If one concludes nihilism, there being no purpose to our lives, one will be left with there being no purpose to life. Levering explains that St. Augustine rejects this by pointing toward the order of the world.
Augustine recognizes the source for the motion of the world; the growth of things and their passing out of existence. Levering explains Augustine’s thought development that, “we know there must be some meaning because we came into existence within a natural order that does not depend on human decision making, an order that has it own intelligible patterns and laws.”[7]It should be no surprise to any student of St. Thomas Aquinas—being the greatest Augustinian of all time—that this is the foundation of the cosmological argument for God’s existence. The world is in motion, creatures that exist in the world change, and all of these creatures in the world do not have to exist. One of the most common analogies is to reflect on firewood that it is in a state of potentiality of being burned, but until it is on fire, it is not in actuality. Augustine is beginning to recognize the nature of God being pure actuality; existence itself. Augustine writes in book 1 chapter 4 that God is “Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful, yet most just; most hidden, yet most present; most beautiful, yet most strong, stable, yet incomprehensible; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never new, never old.”[8]
It is throughout these first pages of the Book 1 where Augustine begins to reflect on his own childhood and coming to the conclusion that a state of deprivation exists even within infants. A conclusion that will lead him to promote infant baptisms against the Manicheans. Augustine observes his infancy through his anecdotal experience with infants. He observes that infants lack both gratitude for their mothers taking care of them and generosity to share what is abundant to others who are need of sustenance.
Augustine writes:
“Who remindeth me of the sins of my infancy? for in Thy sight none is pure from sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day upon the earth. Who remindeth me? doth not each little infant, in whom I see what of myself I remember not? What then was my sin? was it that I hung upon the breast and cried? …For those habits, when grown, we root out and cast away…The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence. Myself have seen and known even a baby envious; it could not speak, yet it turned pale and looked bitterly on its foster-brother. Who knows not this? Mothers and nurses tell you that they allay these things by I know not what remedies. Is that too innocence, when the fountain of milk is flowing in rich abundance, not to endure one to share it, though in extremest need, and whose very life as yet depends thereon?[9]
Augustine continues to examine and develop the basis of his theology in book 1 of his Confessions answering the problem of evil, which he will later explain in more detail in a later book. He writes:
“But no one doth well against his will, even though what he doth, be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God. For they were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered, didst use for my good the error of all who urged me to learn; and my own, who would not learn, Thou didst use for my punishment- a fit penalty for one, so small a boy and so great a sinner.”[10]
In Books 2 through 6, Augustine sets off to explain his fall into a worldly pursuit of the desires of the flesh and his role within the dualism of Manicheanism. Augustine explains that attempting to pursue God, or rather, fit God into our world view leads us into a state of despair instead of happiness. Levering writes, “Augustine shows that in vices, we pathetically strive to be God on our terms rather than receiving God’s gifts in love…God alone gives perfect rest…but God alone is perfect…The vices make the self into the center of all things…because the vices are self centered, they distort our efforts in friendship. Stealing the pears would not have been fun with his companions in the act. Vice turns even friendship…into an occasion for self-seeking.”[11]
What is to be understood here is that Augustine’s examination of conscience has led him to the truth that to indulge in any form of vice, or bad habit, is not liberating but rather an enslavement of the soul to the flesh instead of the communion of body and soul with an interior joy. The practice of virtue, which Augustine learns by ordering his will toward God, is the truest sense of freedom.
The episode of Augustine stealing the pears and his reflection on how original sin plays into his desire to commit the act of faith is probably if not the most famous scene in The Confessions. Augustine reflecting on his motives for stealing pears as a young boy, discovers something at the root has caused him to do evil.
Augustine writes:
Surely, Lord, your law punishes theft, as does that law written on the hearts of men, which not even iniquity itself blots out. What thief puts up with another thief with a calm mind? Not even a rich thief will pardon one who steals from him because of want. But I willed to commit theft, and I did so, not because I was driven to it by any need…For I stole a thing which I had plenty of my own and of much better quality. Nor did I wish to enjoy that thing which I desired to gain by theft, but rather to enjoy the actual theft and the sin of theft.
…We took great loads of fruit from it (orchard), not for our own eating, but rather to throw it to the pigs;
…Behold, now let my heart tell you what it looked for there, that I should be evil without purpose and there should be no cause for my evil but evil itself. Foul was the evil, and I loved it[12].
“Foul was the evil and I loved it.” A chilling remark. Fr. Allan Fitzgerald examines, “Why does Augustine tells the story?…The Key to Augustine’s resolution of this problem is to see that concupiscence of the flesh seeks its rest anywhere but in God…The story of the pear theft is a retelling of the story in Genesis, evoking the mystery at the heart of the story of the fall of Adam and Eve.”[13]
Jonathan Yates, Associate Professor at Villanova University, asserts that Augustine’s story of stealing the pears is one that parallels Genesis 3 and the fall of man. Yates examines that “In Books 1-9, it is the trees and the fruit from Genesis 3 that are most frequently referenced…by Augustine.”[14]The most important parallel between the two stories is the ownership of the tree. In Genesis 3, God gives the command that no one should eat from the tree of Good and Evil. God gives the law, as he has created an orderly world, so Adam and Eve, also being creatures, are subordinate to this order like the laws of nature. What particular separates us from the laws of nature or the animals is the powers of the soul—the intellect. Again, Augustine illustrates that humanity falters when it attempts to supplant God by disregarding its duty toward His order, and instead asserts its desire to choose whatever desires of the human will rather than God. Original Sin, often associated with the first sin, should to some degree be understood that original in the sense of its nature is the pride of choosing what one desires over the duty—or right relation—toward God.
Levering explains it is through the power of the intellect that led Augustine to originally disregard Scripture as Divine Revelation: “Augustine’s pride in his intellectual refinement led him away from the Bible into the foolishness of worshipping a spatial being, a vast luminous being at war with evil.”[15]There is something to note here in our modern age. Many skeptics who read the Bible, or attempt to discredit it, dismiss it because it does not entirely agree in their opinion with scientism or modern historical criticism. However, secular schools of thought often disregard the traditions of reading the Bible as a collection of books with different authors, genres, and audiences rather than a single book. So, in much the same way, it is the pride of our modern age’s trust in their intellectualism that leads them away from correctly understanding the revelation of the Bible.
The Confessions is Augustine’s story of his search for God. In Book 4, Augustine explains that we should seek God through his creation—through beauty. In Chapter 13, he writes, “I did not know all this time, but I loved lower beautiful creatures, and I was doing down into the very depths. I said to my friends: “Do we love anything except the what is beautiful? What then is a beautiful thing? What is beauty? What is it that attracts us and wins us to the things that we love? Unless there were a grace and beauty in them, they could in no wise move us.”[16]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, CCC 2500, recognizes the movement of the soul toward God in the beauty of creation:
The practice of goodness is accompanied by spontaneous spiritual joy and moral beauty. Likewise, truth carries with it the joy and splendor of spiritual beauty. Truth is beautiful in itself. Truth in words, the rational expression of the knowledge of created and uncreated reality, is necessary to man, who is endowed with intellect. But truth can also find other complementary forms of human expression, above all when it is a matter of evoking what is beyond words: the depths of the human heart, the exaltations of the soul, the mystery of God. Even before revealing himself to man in words of truth, God reveals himself to him through the universal language of creation, the work of his Word, of his wisdom: the order and harmony of the cosmos—which both the child and the scientist discover—“from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator,” “for the author of beauty created them.”[17]
The creator of beauty is also the creator of truth. And such, the author of divine revelation which is the most beautiful expression of God’s divine love for us is also the author of philosophical truths and scientific facts. Therefore, as Catholics, we understand a proper relationship of Fides et Ratio in our understanding of our faith in God.
Catholics do not fear scientific discovery with the mysteries of our faith. Catholics understand that all truths are expressed by God: “It is the openness to mystery, where all things can be found beautiful in their values; a recognition of truth which in large part has been lost in our modern Western culture within its understanding of truth. In appearing to understand this idea, Fr. Brian Mullady points out the Pope’s sentiment in paragraph 83 of the Fides et Ratio, “Wherever men and women discover a call to the absolute and transcendent, the metaphysical dimension of reality opens up before them: in truth, in beauty, in moral values, in other persons, in being itself, in God…We cannot stop short at experience alone… The word of God refers constantly to things which transcend human experience and even human thought; but this “mystery” could not be revealed, nor could theology render it in some way intelligible, were human knowledge limited strictly to the world of sense experience.”[18]Levering explains, Augustine urges that wherever truth is, God will be discovered; when we love this Creator God, his love will secure our lives and show us our true good.”[19]
In Book 7, Augustine takes a gander into the understanding of the nature of God, the problem of evil, and how it exists in the world. Levering discusses how Augustine still understands God within a spatial respective. What Augustine is examining is his continuing development away from Manichean dualist theology on the nature of God into the higher forms of being within the Platonic understanding of forms it appears—hence is why Augustine explains God is the manner of sunlight permeating a room. As such the highest forms within Platonic philosophy are, in a sense metaphysical forms, Augustine appears to understand God within the framework. The highest form within the Platonic framework being goodness, Augustine ultimately understands God as the supreme goodness in form. Therefore, God cannot be the originator of evil, because God’s existence as goodness and all his creations being created good indicates his very nature as existence. If God is the form of goodness itself, then evil cannot have form because it would take away, or be a deprivation, from the good form. Augustine’s particular synthesis of Platonic thought and Christian scripture is recognizing that all creatures must possess some form of Good within themselves as creations of the eternal goodness, so there can be no purely manifestation of evil or it would cease to exist. This idea should give us hope.
Augustine on whether evil has form chapter 5 of book 7:
Where is evil then, and whence, and how crept it in hither? What is its root, and what its seed? Or hath it no being? Why then fear we and avoid what is not? Or if we fear it idly, then is that very fear evil, whereby the soul is thus idly goaded and racked. Yea, and so much a greater evil, as we have nothing to fear, and yet do fear. Therefore either is that evil which we fear, or else evil is, that we fear. Whence is it then? seeing God, the Good, hath created all these things good. He indeed, the greater and chiefest Good, hath created these lesser goods; still both Creator and created, all are good. Whence is evil? Or, was there some evil matter of which He made, and formed, and ordered it, yet left something in it which He did not convert into good? Why so then? Had He no might to turn and change the whole, so that no evil should remain in it[20]
Augustine on evil having no substance:
And what more monstrous than to affirm things to become better by losing all their good? Therefore, if they shall be deprived of all good, they shall no longer be. So long therefore as they are, they are good: therefore whatsoever is, is good. That evil then which I sought, whence it is, is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good. For either it should be an incorruptible substance, and so a chief good: or a corruptible substance; which unless it were good, could not be corrupted. I perceived therefore, and it was manifested to me that Thou madest all things good, nor is there any substance at all, which Thou madest not; and for that Thou madest not all things equal, therefore are all things; because each is good, and altogether very good, because our God made all things very good.[21]
[1]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
[2]Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 91.
[3]Desomond, Joan Frawley. “‘What If the Sexual Revolution Didn’t Make Women Happy?’ Mary Eberstadt Asks in New Book.” National Catholic Register. April 3, 2012. Accessed June 12, 2019. http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/some-in-congress-defending-contraception-mandate-ask-where-are-the-women-he.
[5]Fr. Allan Fitzgerald, “The Confessions as Prayer” Confessions Version 2.1.4 Villanova University. Accessed June 11, 2019.
[8]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
[9]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
[10]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
[12]Augustine, and John K. Ryan. The Confessions of St. Augustine. (New York: Image Books, 2014), 28.
[13]Fr. Allan Fitzgerald, “Introduction to Book 2” Confessions Version 2.1.4 Villanova University. Accessed June 12, 2019.
[14]Dr. Jonathan Yates, “Augustine and Genesis 3” ConfessionsVersion 2.1.4 Villanova University.
[16]Augustine, and John K. Ryan. The Confessions of St. Augustine, 65.
[17]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 599.
[18]Phillip Hadden, Fides et Ratio. 2019, Unpublished manuscript, Holy Apostles College and Seminary.
[20]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
[21]Saint Augustine Bishop of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. E. B. Pusey (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1996).
Has God chosen you to love? St. Augustine: On the Predestination of the Saints
St. Augustine is the cornerstone, so to speak, with the development of predestination theology and with its role of Grace and justification in the Christian life. The New Catholic Encyclopedia informs that “Prior to the time of St. Augustine the Fathers of the Church were not preoccupied with the problem of predestination. It was the bishop of Hippo who first treated the mystery exhaustively, with the theological decisiveness so characteristic of him.”[1]
The development of theology is often brought about from an expressed error in doctrine. Naturally, Augustine’s development of predestination theology was a response to Pelagius, a 4th-century priest from Britain, who argued that our will was utterly free to do good or evil and merit salvation from purely good works of one’s own accord. Pelagius’ heresy bears his name: Pelagianism. However, what is vital to understanding the Augustinian notion of predestination and justification is Augustine’s development of the concept of original sin.
In Catholicism, there are two competing ideas of free will and predestination. One is held by the Jesuits called Molinism, and the other is held by the Dominicans as a development of Thomistic theology. Fr. Luis De Molina, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit priest, is the one whose name is the origin of the Jesuit developed theology of predestination:
“Molina taught that there exists in God a knowledge of all possible beings, as well as a knowledge of all possible orders of things. As a result, God knows all possible free acts of all possible men in all possible world orders. Presupposing this knowledge on the part of God, He, for His own reasons, freely chooses one order of things and wills its fulfillment. Thus, He chooses, those men to be saved whom in this world order He has foreseen would make good use of the graces that would be granted to them in these particular circumstances, men whom He has foreseen would persevere and ultimately merit eternal felicity…The explanation of Molina is founded on his opinion concerning the manner by which God knows future free acts. He maintains that this knowledge is in God independently of any decree of the will of God that would physically predetermine the will of man to one course of action, PREDETERMINATION, he holds, would destroy human freedom.”[2]
The New Catholic Encyclopedia examines the response to Molinism from the Dominicans, namely from Fr. Domingo Banez:
Domingo Báñez. In opposition to Molina, the Spanish Dominican theologian held that predestination to glory, viewed in itself, is decreed before the provision of any merits whatsoever (ante praevisa merita). The very first action of God concerning the chosen group of men (the elect) is their election to glory, and, conversely, His very first action concerning the rest of men is their exclusion from glory or from an efficacious election to glory. This predestination of certain souls to glory before the prevision of their merits is, of course, not a result of any merit on the part of man, but is entirely gratuitous. God wills this by reason of His absolute dominion over all creatures and through His inscrutable counsel. This is the first decree of God in the order of intention…To those who were not elected, the negatively reprobated, God, subsequently to the decree excluding them from glory or from an efficacious election to glory, decrees not to give them efficacious graces, but graces that are merely sufficient.”[3]
What is interesting, as explained by Matthew Levering in his book The Theology of Augustine, is that St. Augustine seems to hold the former view at one point and moves to what the Dominican view holds today. Of course, The Dominican view, influenced from St. Thomas Aquinas, is more or less a synthesis of the latter Augustinian understanding of Grace and predestination. Levering writes, “His opponents advocated a view that Augustine himself once held—namely, that predestination depended on God’s foreknowledge of a person’s free act of faith. On the Predestination of the Saints, however, Augustine argues that God’s Grace causes the free charitable actions by which we attain eternal life.”[4]
Naturally, the understanding of the history of St. Augustine’s debate with Pelagianism, the Dominicans viewed the Jesuit understanding, God’s ‘middle knowledge’ as Molina called it, to be Pelagius in origin. At which point both sides labeled the other heretics, and the matter was brought before Pope Clement VIII and decided by Pope Paul V. The papacy did not make a doctrinal pronouncement on the, and it was determined either view could be held by a Catholic.
In both systems, the elect is chosen by God for salvation. The difficulty in Molina’s system is that by attaching a radical free will away from God and asserting that God gives efficacious Grace to those whom he knows will only accept due to his all-knowingness tends to struggle with the philosophical understanding of God’s nature and Divine Revelation. The knowledge of God’s nature through the proofs of God’s existence by St. Thomas Aquinas indicates that God’s nature is existence itself. In some respect, one might say that all creation participates in God’s Divine nature. If there is no God—there would be nothing. Therefore, it would be hard to explain how humanity’s will would then somehow be outside of God’s very own nature. Naturally, the Molinists will state that God merely respects our free choice, but that sentiment isn’t unique to Molinism and can still be used within the Dominican understanding of Grace.
In accord with Holy Scripture, the Catholic Church teaches that God desires us all to be saved—not that we all will be saved:
CCC 74God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”: that is, of Christ Jesus.30Christ must be proclaimed to all nations and individuals, so that this revelation may reach to the ends of the earth:[5]
1 Tim. 2:3-4 RSV
3 This is good, and it is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.[6]
Mathew Levering examines that Augustine, “emphasizing the radical priority of the grace of the Holy Spirit, Augustine focuses the debate away from the difficulties caused by the fact that God does not predestine all persons.”[7]How are we to feel about this? It’s a concept that would be surmised that many Catholics do not know or understand it. Bishop Robert Barron explains the difficulty of this theological understanding in a short video on the differences between Grace and karma, why does God choose some and others? Why did God choose David—forgive David—and not Saul, whom he did not forgive?
God desires all to be saved and gives us all grace sufficient to be saved. However, as Fr. Thomas Joseph White explains in his book, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism, “no one can come to know God personally and approach God with genuine love for God unless God first acts upon a person’s mind and heart by Grace. Grace is a participation in the very life of God…Grace makes us friends with God…” Prevenient grace” is a term used frequently by St. Augustine. It denotes a central New Testament teaching: we cannot take any initiative to turn toward God unless he first takes the initiative to turn us toward himself. This mystery does not entail a denial of free will, but its affirmation.”[8]
Mary, the mother of God, is the perfect example of how our will works with Grace. Now, according to Catholic teaching, Mary was conceived without sin due to a special grace afforded to her by God in which the paschal mystery sanctifies her so that she can be Christ’s mother. In Luke’s Gospel, there is some indication of the special Grace afforded to her by the particular tense of the participle used by Luke. “In the RSV translation, Gabriel says, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!”…[9]The importance of this particular passage is “full of grace,” which comes from the Greek word “kecharitomene.” The tense of this specific verb form is a perfect passive participle, and the message that it conveys doesn’t rightly translate into English. A perfect passive participle verb indicates something that occurs in the past, present, and future; therefore, what Gabriel is saying to Mary, and Luke is recording, is that Mary is with Grace through all time of her existence—she is conceived without sin.”[10]
What is understood from Mary in the scripture is that our wills that are not tainted with original sin are properly ordered with the will of God. In fact, the Augustinian understanding is that because all goodness comes from God and his graces, our choices to choose evil against His will which is perfect and all good, therefore must be from our own will alone. It is by this understanding that is revealed that we are saved by God alone and damned by our own actions.
Augustine teaches that since the fall of our first parents, original sin is spread to the entirety of the human race through the propagation of our human race. It’s interesting that Catholic scientist attempt to overlook Augustine in this particular teaching of the Church like Fr. Nicanor Austriaco O.P., often wrongly labeling Augustine a creation fundamentalist to promote polygenism. However, the magisterium of the Catholic Church from the promulgation of Pope Pius XII in 1950 in his encyclical Humani Generiswith authoritative language has declared that because of the doctrine of original sin, our current human race is the progeny of two distinct parents. Pope Pius XII writes:
37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.[12]
38. Just as in the biological and anthropological sciences, so also in the historical sciences there are those who boldly transgress the limits and safeguards established by the Church. In a particular way must be deplored a certain too free interpretation of the historical books of the Old Testament. Those who favor this system, in order to defend their cause, wrongly refer to the Letter which was sent not long ago to the Archbishop of Paris by the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Studies.[13] This letter, in fact, clearly points out that the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people. If, however, the ancient sacred writers have taken anything from popular narrations (and this may be conceded), it must never be forgotten that they did so with the help of divine inspiration, through which they were rendered immune from any error in selecting and evaluating those documents.[11]
There are three key points to understand when reflecting on these words from Pope Pius XII. The first, we are the progeny of our first parents that disobeyed God. The second, the disobedience of our first parents has created a fallen race, which is not inherently good but is a depraved race. And finally, as Levering points out, “Since Adam and Eve’s fall, the entire human race had been wounded by sin, so as to be in need of a savior.”[12]A Catholic who was to hold to the polygenetic model would simply render Jesus Christ as unneeded because the doctrine of Original Sin is founded on the precept of first parents who then spread that curse to their progeny.
It’s important to note that St. Augustine is making the point that good people who do good things do not go to heaven. God’s friendship is a gift and his invitation to live a life of holiness. Levering reminds us that “Paul here makes it clear that we are not the giver of gifts to God; rather, everything that we have is from God…the act of faith meritorious…It is a good act, and God certainly does reward it. But rewarding a good work of ours. God rewards his gifting that moved us to freely do the good work. All things are radically from God.”[13]
The Dominican understanding is far closer to this particular understand than the Jesuit, as levering points out “we must follow Paul in refusing to claim anything, including our act of faith, as originating from ourselves rather than from God.[14]The Jesuit understanding, Molinism, would argue instead that our actions are our own in response to efficacious Grace rather than the Dominican understanding of an infused movement of habitual Grace. Protestant reformed theology, from Calvin; which influences Evangelicals to Baptist, will attempt to counter this understanding and argue that Catholicism teaches a Gospel of ‘sacramental grace.’ What these objectors do admit is that the Catholic faith is one of Grace—it’s undeniable by those who put forth an effort to study Catholic theology. However, what they fail to understand is the Catholic understanding of the human will and its cooperation with God’s Grace; building the habits of virtue and repenting of the habits of vice. In this context, the salvation of the elect without free will is one that fails to understand Christ’s words, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”[15]
Augustine’s opponent attempt to disparage him through his change of position on the matter of Grace and election by showing him to be at odds with Cyprian. Levering explains here that Augustine once held the Molina system of election but then in his Retractionsrejected it:[16]
Augustine writes:
For thus also the blessed Cyprian would have it to be understood that we say, “Thy will be done, as in heaven so in earth,”—that is, as in those who have already believed, and who are, as it were, heaven, so also in those who do not believe, and on this account are still the earth. What, then, do we pray for on behalf of those who are unwilling to believe, except that God would work in them to will also? Certainly the apostle says, “Brethren, my heart’s good will, indeed, and my prayer to God for them, is for their salvation.” He prays for those who do not believe,—for what, except that they may believe? For in no other way do they obtain salvation. If, then, the faith of the petitioners precede the Grace of God, does the faith of them on whose behalf prayer is made that they may believe precede the Grace of God?—since this is the very thing that is besought for them, that on them that believe not—that is, who have not faith—faith itself may be bestowed? When, therefore, the Gospel is preached, some believe, some believe not; but they who believe at the voice of the preacher from without, hear of the Father from within, and learn; while they who do not believe, hear outwardly, but inwardly do not hear nor learn;—that is to say, to the former it is given to believe; to the latter it is not given.[17]
Levering writes, “from his Retractions that he quotes On the Predestination of the Saints, Augustine points out that there is no reason for supposing that our act of faith, like our other good acts, is not also caused by God’s gracious mercy…Since we receive everything from God, there is no space for an action that is solely or primarily our own…God does not respond to our good action and reward it by Grace; rather, God’s Grace causes our free good action.”[18]
St. Augustine explains, “Therefore I ought first to show that the faith by which we are Christians is the gift of God, if I can do that more thoroughly than I have already done in so many and so large volumes. But I see that I must now reply to those who say that the divine testimonies which I have adduced concerning this matter are of avail for this purpose, to assure us that we have faith itself of ourselves, but that its increase is of God; as if faith were not given to us by Him, but were only increased in us by Him, on the ground of the merit of its having begun from us.”[19]
Naturally, this begs the question, how does our free will exactly cooperate with God’s Grace? The Calvinist answer is that it doesn’t cooperate with it. In fact, the argument proposed by them is that God is sovereign over all things, including those who are to be saved and those who will be damned. Your decision has no bearing on God’s will. Again, this goes back to the understanding of sin as a deprivation of the good. Levering explains that “grace enables us freely to embrace a good we otherwise could not have embraced.”[20]
So, you may hear an Evangelical street preacher say something of the nature, “I am saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ,” which doesn’t contradict any points made by Levering his book The Theology of Augustine. However, the foundation of their theology rests on the premise of faith is the key to justification and no works. “Augustine’s opponents cite Romans 10:9: If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved…Augustine observes that those who hold that faith precedes grace get themselves into a tangle regarding infants who die before they are old enough to make an act of faith.”[21]Augustine writes:
Accordingly, as says the apostle, “It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy,” who both comes to the help of such infants as He will, although they neither will nor run, since He chose them in Christ before the foundation of the world as those to whom He intended to give His Grace freely,—that is, with no merits of theirs, either of faith or of works, preceding; and does not come to the help of those who are more mature, although He foresaw that they would believe His miracles if they should be done among them, because He wills not to come to their help, since in His predestination He, secretly indeed, but yet righteously, has otherwise determined concerning them. [22]
The problem with this, as Levering points out, “Jesus himself call faith a work of God that we must do.”[23]Naturally, what is pointed out to do a work of God that he commands you to do is no different from the Catholic understanding of doing works of mercy, which Jesus commands us in Matthew 25 and St. Paul explains in Galatians 5:6, “For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love.”
According to the Gospel of John, doesn’t Christ say that all shall be taught? The difficulty with Augustine’s answer is that he asserts that “God teaches everyone who is taught,” which on the surface seems to be poor logic.”[24]However, this is where, ironically, both the Molinist system and the Calvinist understanding appears to be the strongest. Augustine writes:
“And immediately the evangelist says, “For Jesus knew from the beginning who were the believers, and who should betray Him; and He said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me except it were given him of my Father.” Therefore, to be drawn to Christ by the Father, and to hear and learn of the Father in order to come to Christ, is nothing else than to receive from the Father the gift by which to believe in Christ. For it was not the hearers of the Gospel that were distinguished from those who did not hear, but the believers from those who did not believe, by Him who said, “No man cometh to me except it were given him of my Father.”[25]
So, how exactly can one side who presents a position of radical free will and the other claim God’ total sovereignty hinge on the same argument? It’s where the one stresses it’s the interpretation of Augustine that leads to their conclusion. For example, The Molinist claim that God’s middle knowledge allows him to respect free will and know who will accept efficacious Grace. The Calvinist positon appeals strictly to the idea that there are hearers and there are those who the Gospel falls on deaf ears. Levering explains, “Augustine is aware of the circular argument that results from his position. God does not teach all because those who are perishing do not wish to learn. He teaches all who are open to learning….the Church prays for everyone living, because God may yet turn the hearts of those who now oppose him.”[26]
[1]PALLADINO, A. G. “Predestination (In Catholic Theology).” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 11, Gale, 2003, pp. 647-653. Gale Virtual Reference Library, http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.uis.edu:2048/apps/doc/CX3407709067/GVRL?u=uiuc_uis&sid=GVRL&xid=f22692e8. Accessed 2 June 2019.
[4]Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 71.
[5]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 24.
[8]Fr. Thomas Joseph White, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2017), 197.
[9]New American Bible, Revised Edition (Washington, DC: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), Lk 1:28.
[10]Phillip Hadden, The Nativity of Christ in History. 2019, Unpublished manuscript
[11]Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis, 37-38.
[17]Augustine of Hippo, “A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints,” in Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 505–506.
[19]Augustine of Hippo, “A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints,” in Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 499.
[22]Augustine of Hippo, “A Treatise on the Gift of Perseverance,” in Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis, vol. 5, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 534.
[25]Augustine of Hippo, “A Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints,” in Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, 506.
The Finches–Haiku
Two finches are here
Golden and Red, now Sparrow.
Eat and Share a meal
Recently, I’ve read two books that have spoken to me on a very spiritual level. The first being In Praise of the Useless Life by Br. Paul Quenon. In that particular book, although I had some issues with theological concerns, Br. Paul spoke about how our society no longer has the capacity for memorization. Our souls no longer have music within them. Of course, naturally, this is because as the second book I’ve read by Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence, we’ve let noise drown them out. How can we hope to pray and hear the voice of God in this fast-paced, noisy atmosphere?
Br. Paul speaks about reading, learning, and writing poetry to stir the music of the soul. He says:
“Prayer, mute as the ground, is a seedbed for poetry. Prayer, while at rest out on the ground, catches plenty of seeds. The kind nursery of nature is congenial to prayer and nurtures poetry. They form a symbiosis, like bees and trees, which thrive on one another despite all their differences. It is quite cogent how psalms in choir, how prophecy and gospel, how all great poetry, nurtures prayer; equally cogent are prayer and poetry. They can do without one another, and often do, but not as well. Like kissing cousins, you have to keep them apart sometimes or they will get to scrapping, get in each other’s way, get to too much kissing. (Quenon, Paul. In Praise of the Useless Life (p. 79).
Br. Paul gives Haiku as an easy example to start writing poetry: a form not concerned with a meter or rhyming, but merely syllables. Of course, as I remember from taking a college class on poetry, depending on what part of the country you are from determines how many syllables are in a word! So, I’ve written a few here and there since reading the book and it has certainly helped me to contemplate the mystery of God.
In this particular Haiku, I write about finches eating together in community. In this community, there can be found golden finches, house finches, and somehow a sparrow—who is no finch at all! As I contemplated this particular scene, I found the voice of God in the silence. The story of the covenant of Israel and that of the New Covenant of Christ. Christians, especially, the Gentiles, are the sparrow who God have given the great grace to dine at the great feast in community of His covenant.
Take a moment to reflect on the image of finches with the sparrow described in this haiku. And reflect with it what St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians 1:3-6:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens] 4 as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. In love 5 he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, 6 for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.
Introduction: Augustine’s Homilies on the First Epistle of John.
It is from the beginning of his prologue on the Homilies on the First Epistle of John that Augustine explains in his usual rhetorical grandeur that, “as in this same Epistle, which is very sweet to all who have a healthy taste of the heart to relish the Bread of God, and very meet to be had in remembrance in God’s Holy Church, charity is above all commended. He has spoken many words, and nearly all are about charity.”[1]Matthew Levering in his book, The Theology of Augustine, explains that from the beginning of St. Augustine’s discourse on the examination on the Epistles of John that “1 John should ignite a fire of love within us.”[2]
Augustine wrote and preached these homilies during the Easter season around the age of 53 in 407 A.D.[3]Levering indicates that these homilies can be broken into two different sections with the first being homilies one thru five and the second half being six thru ten.
First Section Homilies 1-5:
The subjects of both sections of the homilies deal with the disagreement with the Donatist faction of the Church in North Africa. In the first section, Augustine deals with the particular disagreement of the Donatist that claimed that priests to confer the sacraments of the Church must be without the blemish of sin during their entire life. Naturally, Augustine with the beginning third of his life living a life of hedonistic sin took issue with the Donatist position of an unblemished life, although Augustine did agree that a Christian should live a life of Charity.[4]Furthermore, what Augustine understands is that the priest stands in persona Christi and as Alter Christus when he confers the sacraments of the Church, which is why he argues with his Homily on John 5.5 that “Proud Ministers are reckoned with the Devil. But the Gift of Christ, which is pure and flows through them, is not thereby contaminated.”[5]
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches in regards to the priesthood:
1550This presence of Christ in the minister is not to be understood as if the latter were preserved from all human weaknesses, the spirit of domination, error, even sin. The power of the Holy Spirit does not guarantee all acts of ministers in the same way. While this guarantee extends to the sacraments, so that even the minister’s sin cannot impede the fruit of grace, in many other acts the minister leaves human traces that are not always signs of fidelity to the Gospel and consequently can harm the apostolic fruitfulness of the Church.[6]
What is important for many of the faithful to realize is that although priests by virtue of the sacrament of the Holy Orders act In Persona Christi and the imprint of their ordination is forever, they are still men in the sense that they’re still affected by concupiscence which can lead them to sin. In our present age, as the scandals of the Catholic Church reveal the sins of many who lead the Church, it is the place for a well-catechized laity to help steer the ark back on course like those such as St. Benedict of Nursia or St. Catherine of Siena.
Second Section Homilies 6-10:
As explained by Levering, the second section of the Homilies tackle the division of the Donatist into a solely regional Church. Augustine would rebuke this as contrary to the Gospel and the letters of St. Paul. Of course, he would do so in lieu of Christ’s command at the end of the Gospel of Matthew to evangelizing the faith:
18And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” [7]
During the end of the 20thcentury and carried into 21stcentury, as Christians continually live in an increasingly secularized culture in the west, these particular Christians act as if Jesus is some distant concept, but the Incarnation is the spoken Word of God. The spoken Word is still among us. He still commands us to obey His commandments. He is present in the Church; its Liturgy, its sacraments—especially the Holy Eucharist, be reminded his last words in the Gospel of Matthew, “behold, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
It is important to reinterpret Augustine’s critique of the Donatist’s nationalist/ethinic churches (which still do exist: Church of England and eastern Christianity) into a critique against the increasing relativism that seeks to prevent the evangelization of the Gospel in our current cultural climate. It’s a critique need at the very least to ask why some Catholic schools seek to remove statues of missionaries or cover up historical paintings of the evangelizing the faith in the Americas, as to not offend the seemingly new puritan ideals of what is acceptable expressions in the culture. Again, it’s not a critique to ignore a great number of atrocities that occurred; however, it also does not follow that all Christian missionaries were responsible for humanitarian crimes. Of course, many will hear still the horrors of colonization, but we’re experiencing nothing different from those very sentiments as occurred in the past of competing world views attempting to gain a foothold in the current culture. If Christ is the savior of the world? Isn’t it uncharitable not to evangelize the faith?
All baptized Catholics are baptized into the common priesthood of Christ: priest, prophet, and king.[8]As being baptized into the role of prophet, the Catechism teaches it is the duty of the “905 Lay people also fulfill their prophetic mission by evangelization, “that is, the proclamation of Christ by word and the testimony of life.” For lay people, “this evangelization … acquires a specific property and peculiar efficacy because it is accomplished in the ordinary circumstances of the world.”[9]
[1]Augustine of Hippo, “Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of John,” in St. Augustin: Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Soliloquies, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. H. Browne and Joseph H. Myers, vol. 7, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1888), 459.
[2]Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine(Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2013), 49.
[5] Rev. John Rotelle, Augustine Day by Day (New Jersey: Catholic Publishing Corp, 1986), .
[6]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 387.
[8]CCC 1241: The anointing with sacred chrism, perfumed oil consecrated by the bishop, signifies the gift of the Holy Spirit to the newly baptized, who has become a Christian, that is, one “anointed” by the Holy Spirit, incorporated into Christ who is anointed priest, prophet, and king.”
[9]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 239.
St. Augustine: On Christian Doctrine Commentary–Full Text
In his book The Theology of Augustine, Matthew Levering focuses on the theme of love, what is love and how it functions in Christian teaching. As Levering examines, according to Augustine, Scripture teaches how to love. It must be vital for the interpreter of scripture to recognize how the words of scripture direct us to love of God.
So what does it mean to love? Typically, society tends to agree that being a loving person is being a good person, so perhaps, we should start at the question—What does it mean to be good? If a person loves someone there is an act in regard to that person, a willing of the good, or rather, the perfection of that person. Theologian Fr. Thomas Joseph White O.P. writes in his book The Light of Christ, “Goodness is the property of something that has reached its perfection or its goal…A good person typically is taken to be a person who is capable of virtuous moral actions, of justice, charity, mercy, and kindness toward others.”[1]
It is prudent to point out that what is justice, charity, mercy, and kindness toward others isn’t necessarily what another person thinks will make them happy or feel good. Prior to the rise of Christian Neo-Platonic thought around the 3rdand 4thcentury A.D. in Western society, these sentiments were expressed by a group who expressed skepticism against the works of Plato and Aristotle as those schools of thought lacked a development with any theology of their own. The group known as the Epicureans “sought a lifestyle of hedonism focusing on pleasure. These groups (the Stoics) without divine revelation to serve as a development for philosophy tended toward an ideology of self-interest.”[2]
Naturally, it must be understood that within the Christian moral system an adherence to love and to partake in the pilgrimage toward the Kingdom of God, a person is called to deny themselves of perceived pleasures that are not necessarily going to lead them to a perfecting of themselves—a life of holiness—or the goal of heaven. For example, Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”[3]Naturally, if we pair this expression with the beginning of John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[4]It is to be understood that the commandments of the Old Testament are given by Christ. In fact, Jesus says as much, “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them. 18 For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.[5]
What I hope to make clear in regards to love is that it is intimately connected to the good news and the repentance of sin that when we are told that “day shall dawn upon[f] us from on high79 to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace,”[6]to get the full sense of the good news of Easter Sunday, God desires “to give knowledge of salvation to his people in the forgiveness of their sins.”[7]Every Catholic is reminded of the words of Jesus’ call to repentance on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, when they receive ashes on their forehead, as “Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”[8]
Now, an objection usually occurs that says something of the nature, “If Jesus did come to change the law, why are Christians called to follow only some of these Old Testament laws.” The skeptic, or even Christian for that matter, usually fails to recognize a distinction in Judaic understanding of laws. In our modern society, we have different variations of the law, for example: misdemeanor and classes of felonies. In Ancient Judaic-Christianity, there is a distinction between Ritual and Moral law. Catholic Apologist Trent Horn explains in his book Hard Sayings that “St. Paul taught that the Mosaic Law was useful in teaching the Jews how to be holy, but it was incapable of saving them from sin (Gal. 3:10).”[9]Horn goes onto quote Scripture professor at the Augustine Institute Mark Giszczak for a further understanding, “Moral Law has to do with universal principles of right and wrong. Ritual and ceremonial law has to do with symbolic, religious cleanness and uncleanness in Old Testament religion. Judicial or civil law involves structures for the administration of the law in the Old Testament…Aquinas teaches that the ritual and judicial laws have abrogated, but the moral law still holds. So we can eat bacon, but we can’t eat our neighbor.”[10]
So, it is important to understand these distinctions to understand scripture and St. Augustine makes this point. He explains that if the Holy Spirit can give us an understanding of Holy Scripture, the normal method to learn how to interpret it is from teachers. Every once in a while, I watch Evangelical street preaches on Youtube. Of course, one of the main targets for these street preachers are Catholics, so they’ll often stand in front of a Catholic Church while people are going into Mass and announce to them that they’re adherent to a false gospel. Naturally, some Catholics will come over and speak to them about the development of scripture, remind them that Sola Scriptura is not found in the scripture, and the history and development of the Church. At this point, I’ve heard the preacher’s response, “did you learn that at Bible college or seminary? You have man’s gospel not God’s gospel. I know how to interpret scripture because the Spirit is upon me” In this juncture of the conversation, as the Evangelical will only adhere to the text itself, to plant the seed from St. Augustine that scripture shows that the proper way to learn what the scripture says is from human teachers in as St. Paul needed to go to Ananias in Acts 9.[11]
In Book One, St. Augustine examines that there are two tasks with interpreting scripture:
- Discovering What there is to be learned
- Teaching what one has discovered.
St. Augustine also explains that in scripture there must be distinction between things and signs. Perhaps, it could be philosophically explained as matter and metaphysical or even simply the physical and the spiritual. St Augustine makes clear:
“All instruction is either about things or about signs; but things are learnt by means of signs. I now use the word “thing” in a strict sense, to signify that which is never employed as a sign of anything else: for example, wood, stone, cattle, and other things of that kind.Not, however, the wood which we read Moses cast into the bitter waters to make them sweet, nor the stone which Jacob used as a pillow,4nor the ram which Abraham offered up instead of his son; for these, though they are things, are also signs of other things. There are signs of another kind, those which are never employed except as signs: for example, words. No one uses words except as signs of something else; and hence may be understood what I call signs: those things, to wit, which are used to indicate something else. Accordingly, every sign is also a thing; for what is not a thing is nothing at all. Every thing, however, is not also a sign.” [12]
One of the most famous examples in the Old Testament of typological signs is found in the examination of God’s test of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac:
22 ¶* After these things God tested Abraham, and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” 2 He said, “Take your son, your only-begotten son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; and he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” 6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it on Isaac his son;* and he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. 7 And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here am I, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 8 Abraham said, “God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
9 ¶ When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. 10 Then Abraham put forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” 12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only-begotten son, from me.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns; and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.[13]
In this particular narrative the interpreter finds several signs. For example, Abraham is a sign of God—The Father and Isaac is symbol of God—the Son. They partake in a journey up a mountain so that Abraham may sacrifice is only begotten son in atonement while Isaac carries the wood with which will be used to make said sacrifice. Of course, God stays the hand of Abraham but provides another provision for Abraham to make atonement—which God will do with His Son.
There is a difficulty in our modern culture to understand signs. Currently we live in a society of secular rational materialism in one hand and often in the other hand religiously of spiritual fideism. Christians are best served by utilizing the three modes of gaining knowledge: Theology, Philosophy, and Science to avoid the pitfalls of either position in their search for God and truth.[14]In our academic fields, only things constitute as evidence or proofs and we often find in our spiritual lives the sentiment of being ‘spiritual but not religious’—this is not orthodox Christianity.
Originally, science was a subcategory of philosophy, it taught that it was our senses that led us to our understanding of the beyond. In fact, St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Proofs for the Existence of God are built from an understanding of observation from the material world. In Aquinas’ cosmological argument for the existence of God, he illustrates three observations:
1. Change (growth) is motion, what is in motion needs a mover.
- What is caused needs a cause.
- What could possibly exist, could not exist, all possible existence needs a necessary existence.
St. Augustine’s Guide for Things:
- A person must learn to use things in pursuit of perfection or their end—Holiness and God/Heaven.
- Recognition that the world (creature/material) is good, not infinite good for which we were made; cannot give us eternal happiness.
So, examining the Christian faith, we begin to understand that it is inherent that things play a vital role, but they are to lead to the eternal spiritually. In the history of philosophy, the pre-Socratics were materialist that could not move past their own material observations. Naturally, they were followed by the Platonist with the emphasis on the spirit over matter. In our modern society, the camps tend to break into factions of either materialist or spiritualist, whereas, Christianity from the Gospels have always highlighted a both/and understanding of the person.
For instance, The Incarnation is the putting on flesh of the divine second person. The institution of the Eucharist is Christ giving us the grace of His sacred body and precious blood through the material accidents of bread and wine.
Augustine in Book One writes on the importance of the Incarnation moving us toward purification in our souls:
- But of this we should have been wholly incapable, had not Wisdom condescended to adapt Himself to our weakness, and to show us a pattern of holy life in the form of our own humanity. Yet, since we when we come to Him do wisely, He when He came to us was considered by proud men to have done very foolishly. And since we when we come to Him become strong, He when He came to us was looked upon as weak. But “the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” And thus, though Wisdom was Himself our home, He made Himself also the way by which we should reach our home.[15]
In the Gospel of Mark, the physical body plays a central role in the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter. It is through the death of the body where Jesus gives an invitation to faith to her father. Also, when Jesus goes to the little girl; he reaches and gently takes her hand and speaks to her body to say “arise.” Jesus doesn’t look to the heavens, he doesn’t call down here spirit to her body, but rather, speaks to her body as if she is still present. Jesus instructs us that the body is central to the mystery of soteriology and the resurrection of the body:
35 While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” 36 But ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” 37 ¶ And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. 38 When they came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, he saw a tumult, and people weeping and wailing loudly. 39 And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” 40 And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41 ¶ Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi”; which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” 42 And immediately the girl got up and walked; for she was twelve years old. And immediately they were overcome with amazement. 43 ¶ And he strictly charged them that no one should know this,* and told them to give her something to eat. [16]
Christianity has always been a religion where things matter.
How does humanity speak of God?
A Skeptics may object to Christian theology saying, “The Greek Gods are now myths, no one believes in them anymore, why is your God any different?” Matthew Levering explains, “Our human concepts of God fall infinitely short of God. But even though our words about God are inadequate, nonetheless we can speak truth about God…Some conceive of God as the sun or as the entire cosmos; some conceive of gods among which one is primary. But we do not conceive of God truthfully in these ways.”[17]
Levering explains that each person of the Trinity are things in their relation to being that we are meant to enjoy. In the second person of the Trinity, Levering writes, “the divine Word, while remaining unchanged in itself, assumed a human nature so that we could see, hear, and touch him. Christ is both physician and medicine to our wound of sin.”
Augustine writes about the Incaranation and the Word:
chap. 13.—the word was made flesh
In what way did He come but this, “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”? Just as when we speak, in order that what we have in our minds may enter through the ear into the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an outward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being modified in its own nature by the change: so the Divine Word, though suffering no change of nature, yet became flesh, that He might dwell among us.[18]
What is interesting in Levering’s particular work on the theme of Love within the theology of Augustine is that it appears that completely ignores love’s relationship with judgment. Levering explains, “In the Church, which is his “body” (Eph. 1:23), he unites us in charity with him and with each other. Those who love him are liberated from the slavery of sin and will live in glorious union with him forever. Christ calls us to enjoy him now and eternally”[19]
Augustine explains the judgment of those who fail to conform to the truth:
19. Now he whose soul does not die to this world and begin here to be conformed to the truth, falls when the body dies into a more terrible death, and shall revive, not to change his earthly for a heavenly habitation, but to endure the penalty of his sin.[20]
What is “right ordered love?”
Levering explains in his book, The Theology of Augustine, “When we love others and ourselves on account of God, we “use” ourselves and others rather than “enjoy” ourselves and others. In other words, God is our Goal. All our other relationships find their fullness in relation to our enjoyment of God. God gives us our ultimate happiness.”
Augustine explains this in detail, “Neither ought any one to have joy in himself, if you look at the matter clearly, because no one ought to love even himself for his own sake, but for the sake of Him who is the true object of enjoyment. For a man is never in so good a state as when his whole life is a journey towards the unchangeable life, and his affections are entirely fixed upon that. If, however, he loves himself for his own sake, he does not look at himself in relation to God, but turns his mind in upon himself, and so is not occupied with anything that is unchangeable.” [21]
What is interesting when examining Augustine’s understanding of properly ordered love is that it is contradiction with many of the prevailing schools of thought today in our Western culture birthed from modern philosophy that began with Rene Descartes 1596-1650. In fact, it is with Descartes where humanity began to turn their thought inward into what is commonly referred to as relativism today. In classical philosophy from the Greeks, it is understood that objects inform the intellect what they are in relation, but with Descartes’ understanding it is rather the intellect that determines what objects are as they are perceived by that particular intellect. Professor Ralph McInerny explains in his book, A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas, that Descartes “invented a little game called Methodic Doubt. He would sort through what he thought he knew and ask himself if it was not imaginable that it was false.”[22]
The famous Cartesian example is the straight stick that convex in the water appearing to be curved. What is puzzling is that Descartes seems to ignore that philosophy is the deposit of all knowledge. Humans know through their senses that water causes items to convex. It is also know that a stick could be straight or curved. So, the determination that one cannot trust their senses based on sight alone doesn’t appear to follow the ultimate conclusion. The great lengths of Cartesian skepticism is astonishing to the degree that in the end, Descartes concludes that you can only trust that you are because other ‘facts’ could be the result of a demon whispering in your ear.
What is determined by this examination of modern philosophy is that in order to love properly, humanity must learn how to orient their relationship to things. Once the proper hierarchy of knowing is understood—how we can understand things—one can also order their love in “use” as “use” therefore signifies rightly ordered love rather than manipulation or instrumentalization.”[23]To love orderly is to love correctly love God, but it’s important to understand that our love for God is not for His benefit. God does not need our love. When a person loves God it is in benefit to them, which is what God desires for us.
Augustine writes, “No sinner is to be loved as a sinner; and every man is to be loved as a man for God’s sake; but God is to be loved for His own sake. And if God is to be loved more than any man, each man ought to love God more than himself.”[24]So, humanity is called to rightly use things in relation to rightly ordered love for the purpose of the enjoyment of God. However, God doesn’t love us for our own sake, but rather for his own goodness. Augustine explains, “God, however, in His use of us, has reference to His own goodness. For it is because He is good we exist; and so far as we truly exist we are good.”[25]
Book 2
God Makes Interpreting Scripture Difficult.
Levering poses a question to his reader, “If Scripture is an instrument of salvation, then why does it need interpretation? Augustine argues that God allowed obscurities and ambiguities to be present in Scriputre so that those who intellectually proud might be humbled by the labor of interpretation and so that the message of Scripture might not be disdained because it seemed to simple.”[26]It’s interesting that Augustine makes this point because prior to meeting St. Ambrose of Milan, this more or less was his position on scripture. Classics professor Robin Lane Fox writes in his biography of Augustine, “On Sundays, Augustine recalls, he would come to listen attentively to Ambrose’s sermons. People talked and interrupted, as we can infer from Ambrose’s own words, but Augustine was not troubled. He was not there to take in the contents, and yet as he listened to the style, his ‘heart’, typically, opened to what was being spoken…Ambrose was the first person to show him that concealed other meanings, or allegories, could be discerned in awkward verses of scripture.”[27]
Seven Steps to Interpret Scripture
In book two of On Christian DoctrineAugustine lists seven steps needed to interpret scripture:
- Holy Fear of God
- Piety
3.Knowledge
- Fortitude
- Mercy
- Purity of Heart
- Wisdom
Naturally, a Christians will be able see a connection with the list of these particular seven steps with other lists such as the seven Capital Virtues and the Seven Gifts the Holy Spirit that every Catholic is sealed with on the date of their confirmation:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church examines these Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit in paragraph 1831:
1831The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. They belong in their fullness to Christ, Son of David. They complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them. They make the faithful docile in readily obeying divine inspirations.[28]
The Catechism also references how these particular gifts are incorporated during the Liturgy when Bishop lays his hands on the confirmands:
1299In the Roman Rite the bishop extends his hands over the whole group of the confirmands. Since the time of the apostles this gesture has signified the gift of the Spirit. The bishop invokes the outpouring of the Spirit in these words: (1831)
All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by water and the Holy Spirit
you freed your sons and daughters from sin
and gave them new life.
Send your Holy Spirit upon them
to be their helper and guide.
Give them the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of right judgment and courage,
the spirit of knowledge and reverence.
Fill them with the spirit of wonder and awe in your presence.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.[29]
Matthew Levering explains in his book, The Theology of Augustine, what each particular step means in regards to scripture. He explains that the fear of God is a reminder of our needed humility in the presence of God. Piety is also connected to humility in the respect that we attempted to defend our sins by the word of God. Of course, knowledge is needed so that we can love in a right ordered way and not by putting creature ahead of God. Levering reminds us that “In fear of God and piety, the interpreter of Scripture must begin, therefore, by the lamenting his sins.”[30](emphasis my own).
What is interesting about this point is that this understanding of the fear of God and piety can be brought by us to the work of the Liturgy of the Mass. A rebuke from those who deny the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is often heard in this or similar manner, “If you actually receive the Body of Christ and are a part of His body, how come all those who eat and drink his body and blood do not change?” It is a fair point to make against this particular teaching of the Church. What this challenge should do for each of us Catholics is to reorder our love toward God. So, if we take a look at scripture, St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians explains the reason why there is no change in many who partake in the sacrament of the Eucharist:
27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. 30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. 31 But if we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged.[31]
What St. Paul is reminding us is that those who come to Mass need to allow their souls to receive the Savior of the World. If any of us are to fill ourselves with the notion that we are generally generally good, our souls have already been filled with a worldly understanding that cannot give us salvation. If one thinks he or she is generally good and coming to Mass is the work that makes them good, the idea borders on semi-pelagianism. The revelation from God found in the body of the Incarnation, Scripture, and His Church is the grace of mercy. A sentiment understood by Pope Francis in his book, The Name of God is Mercy, he writes, “the prophet (Ezekiel) speaks of shame, and shame is a grace: when one feels the mercy of God, he feels a great shame for himself and his sins.”[32]There is a nuance though of the role of the Church and the Grace of God to be understood. If one examines scripture, whether it is Pharaoh in the Exodus or Herod Antipas who beheaded John the Baptist, the open admonishment of their sins in public hardened their hearts. However, we find in the Gospel of Luke the Prodigal Son who is welcomed by his father when shame of his own actions brings contrition to his heart. The Church should not shy away of teaching what is sin, it is inherently part of the Gospel, but those in the Church should remind themselves daily of their need for the fear of the Lord this how we build fortitude to have mercy. When we can learn to have mercy on even our enemies we can keep our hearts clean so that we can hear from Holy Spirit wisdom.
How to be knowledge of Scripture?
It’s simple, read the scripture. Augustine writes:
“14. In all these books those who fear God and are of a meek and pious disposition seek the will of God. And in pursuing this search the first rule to be observed is, as I said, to know these books, if not yet with the understanding, still to read them so as to commit them to memory, or at least so as not to remain wholly ignorant of them.”[33]
So, how are we to know constitutes as scripture? Levering explains, “To be knowledgeable in Scripture, one must have read the canonical books of Scripture. Those book are canonical that are accepted by the great majority of the most important churches. He lists these books, including (among books that were later contested) Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach.”[34]It is interesting as Levering highlights is that Augustine defends the use of the Septuagint where it differs from the Hebrew manuscripts due to the esteem that Augustine held within Reformation circles.[35]Some of the motivation of participants in the Reformation was a return to authentic early Christian teaching, so they looked at what books the Jews were using in their canon to establish what they would accept as their own. The problem with this particular understanding is that the change of Canon in the Jewish religion occurred after the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. During the 1stcentury A.D. a great many Jews could no longer speak Hebrew, so they used what is known as the Septuagint—the Greek translated Old Testament. Therefore, Jesus’ canon would be reflective of the one listed by Augustine.
Augustine also recognizes that proper understanding and knowledge get lost in cultural and historical contexts when texts are translated into different languages. For example, many who object to the historicity of the Roman Census in Luke’s Gospel is that Joseph didn’t need to go to Bethlehem. So, it is was literary invention from Luke. The problem with this particular understanding is with the Greek word “katalyma.” “Dr. Edward Sri of the Augustine Institute illuminates the use of the word as it can “refer to a guest room, a house, an inn or simply ‘a place to say.’ It is best to translate this word simply a ‘lodging’ to keep open the various possible settings in which Christ may have entered the world.”[36]The translator is also cautioned by Augustine not to be too literal with translated words; therefore, a diversity of translations can serve the interpreter of Scripture. [37]
Book 3
How to Distinguish between the Literal and Figurative?
Matthew Levering explains that Augustine determines that the interpreter can distinguish from the literal and figurative by knowing that “signs can be literal only if they accord with the truth of faith.”[38]Therefore, the interpreter does have some freedom in exercising an interpretation of Scripture so long that it does not contradict the Deposit of Faith handed to us by Apostolic Teaching, Creeds, Dogma, Doctrine, and the Magisterium.
In examining Matthew Levering’s book The Theology of Augustine, Levering leaves out a lot material written by St. Augustine. Naturally, Levering is focusing on the theme of love in his thesis for his book writing, “If one interprets Scripture to say something opposed to charity, one has misinterpreted scripture.”[39]Again, the context of this particular sentiment begs the question, what is charity? What is love? Many in our modern culture would argue that any attempt to subvert the will of another is an act that is opposite of charity—an act of violence. For the sake of clarity, it should be understood that Augustine would not agree with this understanding of what constitutes as love. For those to know what is love or charity, they need to know what is good and what is evil, what is sin and what is virtue. In fact, Augustine totally rejects the modern notion that the diversity of cultures indicates a diversity of truths—the common retort, “That may be what you believe is the truth, but I have my own.” Augustine writes:
- But when men unacquainted with other modes of life than their own meet with the record of such actions, unless they are restrained by authority, they look upon them as sins, and do not consider that their own customs either in regard to marriage, or feasts, or dress, or the other necessities and adornments of human life, appear sinful to the people of other nations and other times. And, distracted by this endless variety of customs, some who were half asleep (as I may say)—that is, who were neither sunk in the deep sleep of folly, nor were able to awake into the light of wisdom—have thought that there was no such thing as absolute right, but that every nation took its own custom for right; and that, since every nation has a different custom, and right must remain unchangeable, it becomes manifest that there is no such thing as right at all. Such men did not perceive, to take only one example, that the precept, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,” cannot be altered by any diversity of national customs. And this precept, when it is referred to the love of God, destroys all vices; when to the love of one’s neighbor, puts an end to all crimes. For no one is willing to defile his own dwelling; he ought not, therefore, to defile the dwelling of God, that is, himself. And no one wishes an injury to be done him by another; he himself, therefore, ought not to do injury to another.[40]
The understanding of knowing that there is absolute truth and absolute wrong that transcends human cultures is vital to the foundation of Levering’s thesis that scripture must be interpreted with love.
Book 4
Matthew Levering in his book, The Theology of Augustine, explains that book four of On Christian doctrine was written sometime after the other three.[41]Nonetheless, Augustine writes about the proper teaching of scripture from the interpreter of it. Levering writes, “Augustine emphasizes that prayer before speaking is primary, but he also points out that St. Paul taught Timothy and Titus what they should teach others. Although the Holy Spirit raises up Christian teachers, nonetheless these teachers cannot suppose that they do not need to learn the content of faith from others.”[42]Naturally, this beings the discussion back to the Evangelical street preachers that attempt to deflect Catholic apologist by claiming they have no need for teachers that the Holy Spirit gives them all the gifts to interpret Holy Scripture. The difficulty with this particular teaching on their part is that it contradicts the Holy Scriptures themselves as St. Augustine explains:
- Now if any one says that we need not direct men how or what they should teach, since the Holy Spirit makes them teachers, he may as well say that we need not pray, since our Lord says, “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him;” or that the Apostle Paul should not have given directions to Timothy and Titus as to how or what they should teach others. And these three apostolic epistles ought to be constantly before the eyes of every one who has obtained the position of a teacher in the Church. In the First Epistle to Timothy do we not read: “These things command and teach?”3What these things are, has been told previously. Do we not read there: “Rebuke not an elder, but entreat him as a father?” Is it not said in the Second Epistle: “Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me?”5And is he not, be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth?” And in the same place: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all long-suffering and doctrine…And so the same apostle says to Timothy himself, speaking, of course, as teacher to disciple: “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned, and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.”[43]
Overall, the entire document On Christian Doctrineis the instruction that the Catholic faith is one of both faith and reason. The Catholic faith is a faith of both the material and the spiritual. We are the creation of God who formed us both with a body united with our souls. It is God who gives us the material sacraments that aid us by His Grace to live out our call to holiness.
[1]Fr. Thomas Joseph White O.P., The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism(Washington: Catholic University Press. 2017), 69.
[2]Phillip Hadden, The Nature of Philosophy, Science, and Theology and Their Relationship. 2019, Unpublished manuscript, Holy Apostles College and Seminary.
[9]Trent Horn, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties (El Cajon: Catholic Answers Press. 2016), 256.
[11]Matthew Levering, The Theology of Augustine, (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. 2013), 2.
[12]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”inSt. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 523.
[13]The HolyBible, Revised Standard Version; Second Catholic Edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), Gen 22:1–13.
[14]Phillip Hadden, The Nature of Philosophy, Science, and Theology and Their Relationship. 2019, Unpublished manuscript, Holy Apostles College and Seminary.
[15]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”inSt. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 525.
[18]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”inSt. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 526.
[20]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”inSt. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 527.
[21]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 527–528.
[22]Ralph McInerny, A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 22.
[24]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,” in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 530.
[25]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 531.
[27]Robin Lane Fox, Augustine(New York: Basic Books, 2015), 187.
[28]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 450.
[29]Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 329.
[32]Pope Francis, The Name of God is Mercy (New York: Random House, 2016), 10.
[33]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,” in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 539.
[36]Edward Sri, Dawn of the Messiah: The Coming of Christ in Scripture (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005), 74.
[37]St. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine,Book 2 para. 17-18.
[40]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,” in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 562–563.
[43]Augustine of Hippo, “On Christian Doctrine,”in St. Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 2, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1887), 585.
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